A little exploration

I returned to a stream yesterday that I had previously visited, once alone and once with Alan.  My first visit proved to be fruitless, but when I returned with Alan I caught two nice brookies in one pool (oddly, neither of us saw anything else in the rest of the stream).  Knowing that the stream flowed under a highway I was interested in seeing what the downstream section had to offer.  On the upstream segment I once again hooked (but lost) two fish in one pool and again saw nothing else.  When I came back from the downstream side I returned to the pool and this time hooked and brought to hand one nice brookie (shown below).

After working my way down to the highway, I jogged across the four lanes (separated by a median)  and fished my way downstream, finding what appeared to be some very nice water.  One thing I immediately noticed was that the stream bed contained a lot of sand.  After fishing for a few hundred feet and getting no response to a variety of flies I came to the conclusion that the sand undoubtedly came from highway runoff and that maybe the almost yearly contamination of it with sand and road salt had destroyed it as brookie habitat.  If true, what a terrible shame as this stretch was really quite nice and has probably been untouched in years.